Silence was the new master of the Black Lotus Sect. It clung to the stone walls, pooled in the empty chambers, and seeped into the very air, thick with the ghost of incense and the faint, metallic tang of evaporated blood. In the center of the main cavern, Lin Xuan sat with his eyes closed. The raw, chaotic energy he had devoured from the seventeen souls had settled within him, a roiling sea now tamed into a deep, powerful ocean. The impurities of their fear and despair were but flimsy driftwood on its surface, easily ignored. He was stronger. That was the only truth that mattered.
With his power stable and his physical vessel reinforced, he allowed his consciousness to drift, to sink below the surface of thought into a state of absolute stillness. It was a mistake.
He found himself adrift in a colorless void. The air was grey, the ground was grey, and the silence here was different, not empty, but heavy, like the moment after a star has died. Before him stood a figure, coalescing from the oppressive emptiness. The figure was him.
It was an older Lin Xuan, clad in robes of deep indigo that seemed to drink the non-light of the void. The power that rolled off this version of himself was terrifying, absolute, making his own newfound strength feel like a child's toy. It was a power that could shatter continents and unmake reality. But the eyes… the eyes were dead. They held no anger, no joy, no ambition. They were black pits of profound, soul-wearying exhaustion. This was a being who had won every battle and found nothing at the end of them.
The future him raised a hand, not in aggression, but in a gesture of infinite fatigue. A single, clear thought, devoid of emotion but heavy with meaning, echoed directly into Lin Xuan's mind.
"Stop."
The thought was a hammer blow. It was a command that ran contrary to the very core of his existence, the singular, driving directive to ascend. Before he could demand an answer, before he could even process the paradox, the grey void shattered like glass.
Lin Xuan's eyes snapped open. The real world, the dark, silent cavern, rushed back in. But the word remained, hanging in his mind like a shard of ice. For the first time since his rebirth, a foreign sensation touched him: not fear, but a cold, logical dissonance. The equation of his existence suddenly had a variable he could not solve.
This paradox was an impurity he could not tolerate. He needed data. What was he supposed to "stop" before? What destination was so dire that it would birth the empty god he had just witnessed?
Driven by this new urgency, he began a methodical search of the sect's compound. He ignored the low-level techniques and pitiful alchemical ingredients. He sought context, history, a map of the path ahead. In the Sect Master's private chambers, hidden beneath a loose flagstone, he found it: a thin, leather-bound journal, its pages brittle with age. It was the personal diary of the Black Lotus Sect's founder.
He lit a candle and began to read. Most of it was the useless rambling of a weak cultivator, but two passages seized his attention.
The first was a detailing of the known path of cultivation on the Azure Wood Continent. It laid out the realms of power, a ladder ascending into the heavens: Qi Foundation, followed by Foundation Establishment, then Core Formation and Nascent Soul. Beyond that lay the realm of true masters, Void Shattering. But there was one final, almost mythical step. The founder had written:
"…and at the peak of all things is Zenith. It is the pinnacle, the absolute limit of what a mortal body and soul can contain. The old masters call it the 'Limit of the Cage.' It is the final moment of mortal power before one must face the Rouages of Ascension and have their fate decided."
Lin Xuan's fingers tightened on the page. Zenith. The final step. The warning from his dream suddenly had a potential destination. Stop before Zenith. Stop before you face the Rouages again.
The second passage was the sect's true origin. The founder hadn't chosen this desolate mountain by chance.
"I did not build our home here for the Qi," the journal read. "I built it because of the Wound. Two centuries ago, a Fallen Star struck this peak. It was not a rock, but something… other. It bled a strange energy that warps reality. Our entire purpose, our sacred ritual, was a clumsy attempt to understand it, to commune with the power it held."
The pieces clicked into place with cold, hard precision. The ritual. The Fallen Star. The Devouring Array's success. He had not just stumbled into a rebirth; he had landed at the site of an ancient, cosmic anomaly.
And he had a warning from his own future.
He stood, the journal held loosely in his hand. The paradox remained. His core directive screamed, "Reach Zenith." The ghost of his future whispered, "Stop." Logic could not bridge the gap. He could not trust the warning without understanding it, and he could not ignore it.
So, he formulated a new plan. A new motivation.
If he could not find the answer in logic or memory, he would force it from reality itself. It would be a brutal, dispassionate experiment. His lost purpose was the missing variable. To find it, he would eliminate all others.
His hypothesis was simple: If I stand at the absolute pinnacle of this world, with no rivals left and no challenges to overcome, what will be left? In the perfect silence of total domination, the truth of my purpose and the reason for the warning will have no choice but to manifest.
He would not simply get stronger. He would systematically dismantle the power structure of the Azure Wood Continent. Every master, every prodigy, every hidden sage they were not opponents to be bested. They were data points to be erased.
He let the journal fall from his fingers into the candle's flame. The dry pages blackened, curled, and turned to ash, destroying the last testament of the Black Lotus Sect. He turned and walked towards the cavern entrance, stepping out into the pale light of a world that was, until this moment, entirely beneath his notice.
His path was clear. He would not seek answers. He would erase all the questions until only one remained.